American novelist

The Echo Maker

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark’s accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.

Finalist, Pulitzer Prize, 2007 Finalist, Great Lakes Book Award, 2007 The Boston Authors Club 2007 Reading List Winner, National Book Award, 2006 Noteworthy books, 2006, Kansas City Star Notable books, 2006, The New York Times Best Fiction of 2006, The Boston Globe Holiday Fiction Guide, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Top Ten Books of 2006, Christianity Today Best Books of the Year, Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction and Poetry of 2006, The Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2006, Seattle Times The Year in Books, New York Magazine Best Fiction of 2006, Washington Post Book World Notable Works of 2006, San Francisco Chronicle Notable Books of 2006, Miami Herald Best Fiction of 2006, Kirkus Best of 2006, L.A. Weekly

Praise for The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

“A grand novel—grand in its reach, grand in its themes, grand in it patterning . . . If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century . . . he’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big.”—Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books

“[A] remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it”—Booklist, starred review

“A brilliant novel . . . A vision of wonder.”—The Boston Globe

“Fascinating . . . In the end we see what Powers, with his beautiful language and broad reach, always wishes to have us see: the eternal mystery of human personality and how it functions in the extreme drama of the modern world.—O, The Oprah Magazine

“A kind of neuro-cosmological adventure . . . an exhilarating narrative feat . . . Powers is a formidable talent, and this is a lucid, fiercely entertaining novel.”—The Washington Post Book World

“A wise and elegant post-9/11 novel . . . The mysteries unfold so organically and stealthily that you are unaware of his machinations until they come to stunning fruition. . . . Powers accomplishes something magnificent.”—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review

“Powers may well be one of the smartest novelists now writing. . . . In The Echo Maker, Powers hopes to plumb the nature of consciousness, and he does so with such alert passion that we come to recognize in his quest the novel’s abiding theme—What it means to be human will forever elude us.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“One of the year’s most engrossing.”—Entertainment Weekly

“[Powers’s] characters are unforgettable, flesh-and-blood individuals as finely drawn as those of any contemporary fiction writer.”—Steve Weinberg, The Seattle Times